I was especially intrigued by the paragraphs about the Karma Kosher Trail:

What began in 1994 as the great post-military escape to India has turned into a new-age Diaspora of young and embittered men and women looking to flee what they say is their country’s armed turmoil with the Palestinians and the spiritual emptiness of Judaism.

Many of the revelers on the sands of Anjuna Beach and elsewhere along what’s known as the Karma Kosher Trail say they have no intention of returning to Israel, despite the efforts of four local rabbis and a $200,000 joint government-private sector campaign funded by Israeli banking and telecommunications magnate Nochi Dankner, a devotee of the Dalai Lama and chairman of IDB Holding Corp.

Shlomo Breznitz, a director of the campaign and founder of the India-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group in Israel, says the exodus is worrisome and potentially tragic. “Karma kosher is much more of a widespread phenomenon than Israelis want to admit,” says Breznitz, 71, a retired member of the Israeli parliament and former president and provost of Haifa University.

I had heard in the past that Israelis were the main inheritors of the Goa Trance scene and that it was especially popular among Israeli soldiers. I also mentioned that to a friend who insisted that that was impossible. But, somehow, it made perfect sense to me… Only thing is, Goa Trance is kind of limited and has long outlasted its shelf life (as far as I’m concerned – and I used to like it sometime ago). But I imagine that they have found plenty of other music in Goa by now…

Reading the article further, I noticed that some rabbi and some other fanatics are panicked over this trend and want to stop it. Personally, I think it sounds like a very interesting phenomenon, and I hope it continues – though I also am concerned about these kids encountering some violence sometime in the future, from religious bigots of several different persuasions. Here’s hoping that they manage to keep as safe as possible and that none of them ever get tempted or persuaded to return to the Israeli army.

I was doing a search on Cheb i Sabbah, mainly to find if there are any new and noteworthy reviews of his new album Devotion (I didn’t really find any) and also to see if he’ll be playing my town anytime soon (yes, at Drom on March 15 -yea!), when I stumbled upon this interview in Jewish Journal. And this is a particularly interesting interview, because, with their perspective, they brought out some comments and information from Cheb that you probably won’t find in most other publications (or, I should say, most of the other not-so-many publications that interview him). Here are a couple of good excerpts:

JJ: Most of your music has a heavy Indian influence. Why?CS: I was exposed to Indian music in the 1960s, while living in Paris. The French were really into ethnomusicology, so I always heard music from around the world. I’d grown up with North African Andalusian music, which is based on times of day, seasons, longing, separation, sadness, joy, all of that. Classical Indian music is the same thing, so it wasn’t a big leap.

JJ: How did you grow up with Andalusian music?CS: It was developed in Spain by the Jews, Berbers and Arabs, and after the Spanish Inquisition, it traveled throughout the Arab world. In Algeria, the whole tradition of Andalusian music was largely maintained by the Jews, and it just so happened that my mother’s cousin was married to one of the master musicians. So I grew up right in the middle of that.

JJ: How long has your family lived in Algeria?CS: We trace back 2,600 years – to the Babylonian conquest of ancient Israel. Following that exile, Jewish refugees migrated throughout the region, many settling in North Africa. At the time, the Berbers of North Africa were pagan, but many were influenced by the Jewish idea of monotheism and converted. Since that time, there were numerous invasions throughout North Africa – including that of the Bedouin Muslims. The Berbers fought the Bedouins but lost, so many converted to Islam. My family is among those who stayed Jewish.

. . .

JJ: Do you feel at home in San Francisco?CS: No. That is one symptom of displacement. Once you’ve been displaced long enough, nowhere is home – not even where you were born. If you look at it from an Indian point of view, in a way it’s good, because you can’t be attached to anything – even your country, your roots and your culture. I feel it’s good to practice nonattachment, because in the end, when you go, you can’t take anything; so why be attached?

Considering my present location, and the fact that I’ve also been able to download so much fantastic old Bollywood music for free (with some of those files having been taken from the old vinyl records, which sometimes sound so much nicer to me than the reprocessed CDs), I didn’t think that I would be buying Indian music or Bollywood music in the Manhattan Virgin Records stores again. But the one on 14th Street has some good bargains sometimes (even if the regular CD prices are pretty high), it can be very relaxing to shop there (as long it’s not during prime time), and it is open until 1 am. So, this evening, while I was picking up a copy of Cheb i Sabbah’s Devotion (also decently priced for under $15, if I recall correctly), I found a marked-down $10 copy of the Rough Guide to Bollywood Gold. I’ve always found these Rough Guides to be very decent, even if they are supposed to be for world music dabbler-beginner types, and their bhangra compilations are among the best that I’ve found over the years. Plus, those bhangra comps happened to be put together by one DJ Ritu, the same woman who put together Bollywood Gold. So, altogether, it was hard to pass this one up.

Though I don’t think I can say that there’s anything particularly special about this compilation, just that it provides for a good listen – which, of course, was no surprise…

I already had a few of the songs that are on here, most of them with that original-vinyl sound that I like so much, thanks to Parties, Sarees and Melodies. (I’ve downloaded about six albums from that site so far, and I can easily see my collection expanding to at least a dozen. And most of the albums on that blog come from the “Golden” era that DJ Ritu also focuses on, between 1960 and 1980.) But I didn’t have at least half of these songs and I admit that I hadn’t even heard a few (though I’m not going to reveal which ones, lest I expose my western ignorance). Moreover, I still think it is good to get a new, nicely packaged CD comp once in a while, even if that might just be a sign of my age, etc. (Actually admitting that I listen to CDs might just be showing my age – though I listen to vinyl too, but DJs have helped to keep that as a “young” medium… Unfortunately, I’m a bit poor right now as well as being technologically lazy, so while I might be downloading a bunch of music (and then burning it), I’m not going to start messing with the new formats for portable playing anytime soon.) And (sorry about that awfully long tangent), the Rough Guides comp is probably as good as most (not that I have many others to go by, of course)…

If I have any complaint about this one, it’s maybe that I would not have had quite the same distribution among the featured singers. For instance, this has no less than four tracks featuring Kishore Kumar and only two with Mohammed Rafi, while I would probably have done the reverse. Additionally, I don’t find all the songs to be equally to my liking. (In fact, I kind of wonder if anybody can really enjoy listening to “Aaja Aaja Main Hoon Pyar Tera” or if this just has a lot of nostalgic appeal for those swingin’ 60s buffs. Unfortunately, that happens to be one of the only two Rafi songs (the other one being a song from Junglee that I like a bit more though it’s not one of my favorites either). If she wanted to do that sort of thing, I’m not sure why she didn’t include “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” aka “Ghostworld,” which is so much better, I think.) But then again, there are some very good songs here too: It was particularly nice to hear “Awaara Hoon” (sung by Mukesh) even if I’d already downloaded that one. And there is indeed some real gold – such as…

In closing, I’m going to post the song that is my favorite on this whole compilation… I might have even written this review partly for an excuse to post this – and it could very well be the song that makes the whole comp worth buying, even with all the above-mentioned considerations in mind:

P.S. I noticed last week that the accompanying Rough Guide book was going to be hitting an area Barnes & Noble on Feb. 1 or 2… Might be time for yet another chain store purchase. And by the way, there is no connection between their titles and the title to this blog, which was taken from a line in an M.I.A. song without any Rough Guides in mind. (Though the coincidence is kind of nice.)

P.P.S. [2/9] And, of course, none of this should be confused either with the legendary British post-punk label Rough Trade…which is exactly what I did at one point, until I finally caught it!

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